Can you hear me now?

OK, here's a question for those people with teenagers: When did you capitulate and give your teenager a cell phone? What kind of service plan did you sign them up for?

I think I must be terribly old-fashioned. We really had no intention of giving our oldest son a cell phone until we felt that he really needed one. Well, enough nights waiting for him to call us from football games convinced us that he might need one, just for emergencies and such. He did some research, and decided on a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go phone. I was cool with that, as it offers decent price for a pre-paid cell phone plan. That phone turned out to be very handy, as we ended up using it a couple of times while on vacation, as our Cricket cell phones had no service.

The reason we decided on the pay-as-you-go phone was to encourage him to be judicious with his minutes, and to only use the phone for emergencies. The deal was that he had to earn his own minutes. That lasted about a week. Since he has had the phone, his friends have been txt'ing him left, right, and center. Sure enough, he was out of minutes while we were on vacation, forcing us to buy him a card to recharge his minutes.

Tonight, we got a call from him, while he was supposed to be out with his grandma helping unload furniture. He had been talking to her, and had managed to convince her to add him to her T-Mobile plan, and could we please let him get a phone?

Now, I have nothing against T-Mobile. We had T-Mobile for years; they're very reliable, and we never had screwy issues with our bill, like my in-laws had with Cingular. The thing is, if we wanted him to have a phone with unlimited minutes, we could afford to add another phone to our Cricket service, dust off the old Kyocera Phantom that sits in my sock drawer, and hand him a phone with unlimited minutes and txt, easily. That was not, however, the point. He hasn't yet shown any real responsibility with his phone, has not earned any minutes, and now wants to go buy another phone so recently after buying one.

Don't even get me started on the lame line that everyone else has one. He's tried that one before, and it failed spectacularly. Frankly, I don't care if every single other person at his school has a cell phone that Mommy and Daddy pay for happily (and I know that's not true), we're trying to teach him something that he hasn't learned yet, or at least hasn't shown any prowess yet.

Am I being overly anal about this?!?